Welcome back!
Sign in to start taking action.

Thanks for signing up as a global citizen. In order to create your account we need you to provide your email address. You can check out our Privacy Policy to see how we safeguard and use the information you provide us with. If your Facebook account does not have an attached e-mail address, you'll need to add that before you can sign up.

"Trump's action could push the Earth over the brink.”

There’s a reason that Stephen Hawking and his peers are trying to inhabit Mars, rather than Venus — temperatures on Venus surpass 800 degrees Fahrenheit and the planet is relentlessly pelted by sulfuric acid.

Yet Hawking said in a recent interview with the BBC that Earth could start looking and feeling a lot like Venus if humans fail to act on climate change.

And he pointed directly at US President Donald Trump’s administration for accelerating the path to Venus-like conditions.

"We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible," the astrophysicist said in the interview with BBC News. "Trump's action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid."

The effects of climate change are accelerating around the world. A recent analysis found that sea level rise increased by 50% since 1993. Countries are facing coastal erosion, heat waves, droughts, flooding, extreme weather events, and more. Further, there are signs that natural buffers against climate change are reaching their breaking points. While carbon emissions stayed flat in the past three years, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere surged, meaning that less carbon is being soaked up by the oceans and forests.

In his interview, Hawking said that the collaboration envisioned by the Paris agreement could prevent a Venus-like future.

Following Trump’s departure from the Paris agreement, countries around the world reaffirmed their commitments to tackling climate change. That kind of resolve could make the goal of keeping temperatures under a 2-degree increase from pre-industrial levels attainable in the end.

Hawking acknowledged this potential, but he spared no words in his critique of those who are making it harder to inhabit Earth.

"By denying the evidence for climate change, and pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, Donald Trump will cause avoidable environmental damage to our beautiful planet, endangering the natural world, for us and our children," he said.